Quarrel with the King Read online

  In an era of increasing bureaucratization of government, and an emasculation of the old magnates of medieval England, there was a frisson to this manly independence, which a mere created earl or baron could scarcely rival. It is not surprising that any memory of the illegitimacy of William Herbert’s father was quietly soothed away. Here was a man conducting his life as a power-broking baron in the mold of his ancestors.

  What Owen does not mention in his catalogue of honor is that the first time this William Herbert made his mark on the world, it was as a murderer. His father had died in 1510 when William was three, and the boy went to live in the household of his relation by marriage, the Earl of Worcester. Worcester was a warrior, administrator, diplomat, and the great producer and showman of Henry VIII’s court. He was responsible for the tournament ground and pasteboard palaces set up for the meeting of Henry VIII and François I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in the summer of 1520. It was Worcester who arranged for five thousand people to be shipped across the Channel to France to organize this event. Vast quantities of timber and glass were brought to the site. Three hundred knights took part in the tournament, over which Worcester himself presided as one of the judges. William Herbert, aged thirteen, was at his side, as his page, learning the intimacy of power and glory.

  Worcester died on April 25, 1526, and that year William Herbert appears as a “gentleman pensioner” at the court of Henry VIII. It was the lowest rung of court life. One could be a gentleman pensioner and still be thrown into jail for debt or be arrested on suspicion of treason, but it was the necessary first step on the road to significance. But then Herbert’s career came adrift. On midsummer’s eve 1527, a time for drinking and feasting, bonfires, high spirits, sex, and violence, there was an incident in Bristol, the great seaport already spreading its networks to the New World, that might have destroyed him.

  The mayor of Bristol, a man known as Thomas or “Davy” Broke and later described by the hostile protestant preacher George Wishart as “a knave and gorbely [fat] knave,” together with his “brethren”—perhaps “that droncken Gervys, that lubber Antony Payne, & slovyn William Yong, and that dobyll knave William Chester,” all leading Bristol merchants and all identified by Wishart as Broke’s associates—were coming back into the city after some duck shooting. Unexplained, William Herbert, already with the reputation of “a mad fighting young fellow,” was there with a gang of Welshmen to meet them on the bridge. They began to talk and “for want of some respect in compliment” fell into an argument and then a rage. A fight broke out, and Herbert killed one of the merchants, a man called Richard Vaughan, from an old and distinguished Bristol family.

  The incident fits. Herbert’s origins in South Wales were just across the Severn. The Bristol men would have known he was an illegitimate son. Herbert had by now spent most of his life in the heady atmosphere of court, wearing the badge first of his kinsman the Earl of Worcester, then of the king himself, acquiring the sheen and courteousness of that world. His own honor would have been both high and tender in his mind, and now he found himself insulted by a party of drunk, duck-hunting Bristol merchants. Of course he turned to his knife.

  Herbert and the Welshmen who were with him “fled through a gate into the Marsh and escaped in a boat with the tide.” After that, wanted for murder, named in a Bristol’s coroner’s report as the man who did it, Herbert disappeared. Nothing is known of him for the next seven or eight years. John Aubrey thought he had gone to France, to the Valois court, but as Herbert in later life was unable to speak French, that is unlikely. Maybe he went to ground in Wales, surrounded by the protective world of his Herbert connections, sheltered by the common understanding that Welsh fighters had long since been killing fat Bristol merchants. Either he, or someone else called William Herbert, killed “one honest man” in Newport in South Wales in 1533, and his servant was convicted of killing yet another Welshman the following year. Brutality lay at the center of his life.

  In 1534 Herbert was still being described as a “late gentleman of the household,” but soon after that he returned to court, was readmitted to the glowing circle near the king, and in 1535 was promoted to become “an esquire of the body,” an honorific but one that implied a further penetration of the layers surrounding the sovereign. The story of this family over a period of more than one hundred years is hinged, at least in part, to that bodily geometry; closeness to the king, to his actual body, his breathing presence, is the one variable that governs their fortunes. Thuggery and exile among the ancestral comforts of South Wales was one thing; sharing the same physical space as the fount of all honor and the source of all lands was quite another.

  On returning to court, Herbert met Anne Parr, the woman he would marry. She and Herbert may have fallen in love. Neither had any fortune to bring to the marriage. Both were orphans. Both were making their way in the world of the court. And Henry VIII’s court in the 1530s was one where love affairs were frequent and courtly love admired and practiced as necessary and civilizing elements of the Italianate courtier’s life. The most beautiful lines written in Tudor England are by Thomas Wyatt, in his poem bemoaning the un-Arcadian, treacherous world of calculation and disloyalty at court (“They fle from me that sometyme did me seke”), which describes just such a moment of unadorned and immediate love:

  When her lose gowne from her shoulders did fall

  And she me caught in her armes long and small

  Therewithal sweetly did me kysse

  And softly said dere hert howe like you this

  Love itself might also be seen as a form of Arcadia, a private place in which the fever and anguish of being is soothed away.

  William Herbert was about eight years older than Anne Parr. A drawing by Holbein, probably made when Anne was about twenty, in 1535, shows her as she was when William fell in love with her. As an image, it is a universe apart from Herbert’s tense and wary assertion: calm, pure, and controlled, with a clarity and directness about her eyes and a firmness but no meanness in her mouth, she seems all spirit. It was a marriage of opposites. It is a strikingly Protestant image, nearly shadowless, a form of portraiture motivated by truth and clarity, a product of the Reformation with the removal of the dark and its substitution with the clear-eyed, clear-skinned vision of Englishwomen such as Anne Parr.

  In 1531, as an orphaned sixteen-year-old after her mother died, Anne had come to court to serve as a maid-in-waiting to Henry VIII’s sequence of wives. She was the daughter of a gentry family of no great wealth or standing but one that since 1483, over four generations, had served England’s queens. Her mother, Dame Maud Parr, had been both confidante and lady-in-waiting to Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and now both Anne Parr and her elder sister, Katherine, were serving in the household of Catherine of Aragon’s daughter, Princess Mary. Sir Thomas Parr had died in 1517, and both girls had been brought up, along with their brother, William, by the formidable Dame Maud, who was fluent in French and maybe also in Latin, a manager of lands and contracts, an educational theorist, and friend of the humanist scholars Thomas More and Roger Ascham. Dame Maud had provided her daughters with the richest possible humanist education, setting up a small school in their house in Leicestershire. Its methods had been modeled on the program Thomas More had ordained for his own family, teaching the children philosophy, mathematics, Latin, French, Italian, chess, the study of coins, art theory, medicine, and rigorous training in the Scriptures. Anne had emerged a scholar. In later life she would become patron of Fellows at St. John’s College, Cambridge. She sent two of her sons to Peterhouse. Roger Ascham, who became Elizabeth I’s tutor, borrowed Anne’s copy of Cicero and quoted Ovid in the letters he wrote her. The fineness and purity that glows from the face of Anne drawn by Holbein was no illusion.

  Both Anne and her sister would become champions of the reformed religion that swept through England in the 1530s. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that their education in the highest and most sophisticated form of Renaissance humanism
prepared the ground for a skeptical attitude toward the inherited ways of the Church. Anne Parr, in other words, looks like a Protestant in the making. She also looks like William Herbert’s better half. They were probably married late in 1537, when she was twenty-two and he thirty-one.

  No one could have predicted that they would be the foundation of one of the great families of England. Anne had remained no more than a maid-in-waiting, a body servant, to the evolving sequence of queens; William was still an Esquire of the King’s Body. They were without any prospect of inheritance, landless, and disconnected from that great engine of power but playing their hands in the life of the court, the only place where that condition could be altered. “Upon the bare stock of their wits, they began to traffic for themselves.” Over the next twenty years, the two of them played that game more successfully than anyone else in England.

  William’s attitude toward religion would remain equivocal for the rest of his life. He changed as circumstances required him to change. He was the heir to a great name but to nothing else. Treading carefully was an aspect of survival. He believed in the religion that the king or queen of the day required him to believe in, no more and no less. Such changes of religious allegiance were no rarity in sixteenth-century England—many justified it openly on state grounds—but his voltes-faces were among the slickest and the sweetest. In the 1590s, the old, slippery smooth courtier the Marquess of Winchester was

  questioned how he stood up for thirty years together amidst the changes and raignes of so many chancellors and great personages. Why, quoth the Marquess, Ortus sum ex salice, non ex quercu, I was made of the plyable willow, not of the stubborn oak. And truly the old man hath taught them all, especially William, earl of Pembroke, for they two were ever of the King’s religion, and ever zealous professors.

  Meanwhile, the two young Herberts, as if in a game of grandmother’s footsteps, were making their slow and careful approach to the center of power. Anne became a Gentlewoman of the Queen’s Household, and William one of fifty new Gentlemen Spears, as they were called, an extravagantly equipped honor guard with gold chains and gilt poleaxes, an élite band of strong, young, capable courtiers among whom Henry felt at ease. Will Herbert soon rose again to become a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, at a stipend of fifty pounds a year, one of a set of efficient, tough, educated officials of royal government entirely dependent on the favor and will of the king. They were no palace popinjays or playthings of the king but, for him, essential information-gathering, will-enforcing tools of government, diplomacy, and war. Herbert was approaching the crown in order to achieve his independence from it.

  Needing to fund the glorious palace-building, war-waging methods of his court, the king’s eyes fell on the great medieval estates of the monasteries. In the spring of 1539, the ancient abbey at Wilton, among eight hundred in England and Wales, was dissolved and its wonderful lands taken into the ownership of the crown. Much of the rest of the year at court must have been filled with speculation as to who the recipient of Wilton might be. In May 1540 the door opened: William Herbert received a twenty-one-year lease of the site of Wilton Abbey; in July he was appointed chief steward of all the abbey’s lands. He was knighted, Anne became Keeper of the Queen’s Jewels, and that autumn the couple’s son Henry was born.

  For three years, subject only to the twenty-one-year lease, Wilton remained the property of the crown, but in April 1542 Henry VIII gave it by a “mere motion”—as it is described in the enormous Exchequer document prepared for the King’s Remembrancer, the official whose task it was to remember everything that had been done by the king or in his name—to “our beloved Servant William Herbert Knight and Anne his wife.” The gift was for their lifetimes only. The document is vast because it lists the vastness of the gift. The house and site of the abbey “now dissolved” and all our “messuages houses edifices dove houses stables mills barns orchards gardens waters ponds parks lands soil and hereditaments whatsoever” were to go to the chosen couple. The list rolls on and on: manors, lordships, tithes, corn sheaves, grain, hay, “fisheries and the fishings of our waters,” the “twenty and five quarters of salt annually extracted from the salt pits” in Dorset, the “granges mills tofts cottages meadows feedings pastures waste furze heath and marshes,” and all sorts of “fees farms annuities and pensions” that the “last abbess and convent” had been entitled to. The list of places, and of every item in them, was a hymn to accumulation, the beauty of materiality, satisfying the deepest possible lust for land and property. The King’s Remembrancer was transferring the ownership of an entire world, and its driving force was the “mere motion” of regal power, a fiat, a breaking of bonds that had persisted for centuries. William Herbert was now in possession of what John Aubrey would call “a countrey of lands and Mannours,” a fiefdom, a power base, and a landscape.

  This was good but it was not everything. After their deaths, as things stood, the great estate would revert to the crown. But in July 1543, the world of the Herberts changed. Anne’s elder sister, Katherine, to whom she was exceptionally close and who shared with her a passionate attachment to the reformed religion, married the king. Katherine Parr was a beautiful widow, and the king had fallen in love with her. Both William and Anne Herbert attended the wedding, at which Henry shouted, “Yea!” when asked if he wanted to marry Katherine. Anne helped her sister prepare the black silk nightdresses the king liked his brides to wear, and William Herbert suddenly found himself the royal brother-in-law. Lands, offices, and cash began to flow toward him. As their London house, the new queen gave them the great old palace of Baynard’s Castle, on the Thames. With it came the right to bind any traitor “at low tide to a pillar in the Thames near the Castle Wall, leaving him there for two floods and two ebbs.” The totality of power was lapping at the Herberts’ shores.

  Wilton and its train of beauties became the Herberts’ property forever in January 1544. Royal stewardships in Wales followed, and in 1546, William Herbert became Joint Chief Gentleman of the Bedchamber, the position with the steadiest and most regular contact with the king in his most private moments, the soft, potent heart of monarchy.

  In the summer of 1543, Herbert had started to erect his new house at Wilton, “a large & high built square of hewen stone.” It was in some ways a Tudor muddle, with pediments and onion domelets, classical busts in circular frames, scallop shells, and out-of-scale columns and pilasters—a collection of ideas borrowed from the Renaissance, with Corinthian capitals and exquisite entablatures all finely executed but with little understanding of the system to which they should have belonged. Herbert liked to wear a large ring on each index finger, and his new house at Wilton was rather like those rings: expensive, flashy, and big. Its lead rain heads and downpipes were decorated with a rich and barbaric mixture of green men and beautiful acanthus leaves twisted into elegant knots. All over the building, as you can still see if you creep in under the attic spaces of the later additions, there are brilliant colors and gilding and armorial beasts and legendary figures encrusting the walls. The house was an adaptation of the abbey, probably based around the abbey cloister, but it cost more than £10,000, equivalent to the cost of building a good hundred manor houses. Sixteen acres of five-and six-year-old coppice trees were felled to provide the fuel to burn the lime to make the mortar with which the stones were bound together. Those stones came either from the partly demolished abbey or from the abandoned site of the ancient city above Salisbury, Old Sarum, carted in to the palace by the River Nadder all summer long.

  Parts of the Tudor house remain embedded in the seventeenth-and nineteenth-century additions, and one porch was preserved by Inigo Jones as a fine example of early Renaissance style, but the effect of Herbert’s showiness can be measured by an account of it made in 1635 by a Lieutenant Hammond, who was touring the west of England. He found Wilton as it was just before the transforming Jonesian work on the house had begun. It was a building larded with richness: a gallery “richly hung and adorn’d with stately and
faire pictures”; cloth of gold hangings, “over the Chimney peece the statue of King Henry 8th richly cut and gilded ouer,” “the great Dyning Chamber, very richly hang’d”; in it “a most curious Chimney Peece, of Alablaster Touch-Stone and marble, cut with seuerall statues, the Kings and his lordships owne armes richly sett out.” Accounts have survived of marble and jasper doorcases as well as “eight great tables” imported from France.

  Buried inside this gilded case was the hidden fist—still there, remarkably, in 1635—something that Lieutenant Hammond felt “may well compare with any in the Kingdome”:

  That is a most gallant Armory, which is 60 yards in length, the number of Armes therein will compleatly furnish, and fit out 1000 Foote, and Horse: besides 30 Glaues [lances], 30 Welsh Hookes, 60 Black Bills, 20 Holy water Springers [?], and 60 Staues, which were weapons to guard the old Lord’s Person, with many other Offensiue, and Defensive Armes as Coats of Maile &c.

  In a special room at the end of this huge private arsenal were the great suits of armor Herbert and his son collected: a suit of armor made in Greenwich for Henry VIII and another for Edward VI, complete suits of Milan armor, “the Lord William his Turkish Scymiter, or sable, and his whole armour for his Horse richly grauen and gilded.”